With a total investment of 300 million yuan, Momenta and SAIC have established a joint venture to ramp up efforts in high-level intelligent driving.

SAIC has transferred the controlling stake in its intelligent driving joint venture to an algorithm company.

On November 5, the board of directors of SAIC Motor reviewed and approved a resolution: it plans to jointly establish a joint venture with Momenta and Yandian Technology with a registered capital of 300 million yuan. Among them, Momenta subscribes for 153 million yuan, holding 51% of the shares; SAIC Motor subscribes for 75 million yuan, holding 25% of the shares; Yandian Technology subscribes for 72 million yuan, holding 24% of the shares, and the total shareholding of the SAIC ecosystem is 49%.

In the joint venture cases between domestic automakers and intelligent driving suppliers, the situation where the algorithm company holds the controlling stake is rare. In the past few years, car companies have dominated intelligent driving joint ventures more often, while suppliers are the technology delivery parties. This equity arrangement means that SAIC has chosen a path that gives more decision-making power to external technical partners in the construction of core intelligent driving capabilities.

01

What this cooperation actually means

First, let's look at who the three parties are respectively.

Momenta is an intelligent driving supplier. According to its own semi-annual report, the number of newly installed units in the first half of the year was about 321,000, with a total exceeding 1 million units, maintaining its position as the top third-party supplier of urban NOA, with a really wide customer coverage. As of the first half of the year, it has cooperated with 26 OEMs, with a total of 105 mass-produced models, and the customer list covers Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, Toyota, BYD, etc.

SAIC Motor is Momenta's earliest and largest institutional strategic investor, as well as its largest external shareholder. It can be understood that SAIC is not only a shareholder of Momenta, but also one of its largest mass production customers, and now it is going to become its joint venture partner.

SAIC announces the establishment of a joint venture with Momenta

What is easy to be ignored is Yandian Technology. This company was founded in June 2022, its sole shareholder is Yanfeng Automotive Trim Systems Co., Ltd., and its actual controller is the Shanghai Municipal State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which belongs to the same SAIC Motor Industrial Group system as SAIC.

Yandian Technology is positioned as an independent electronic business platform under Yanfeng, focusing on intelligent cockpits, with its core product being the cockpit domain controller. The intention of bringing Yandian Technology in is not hard to read: the domain integration of intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit is a definite direction for the evolution of automotive electrical and electronic architecture. If the coordination between the cockpit domain controller and the intelligent driving algorithm can be realized within the framework of the joint venture, SAIC will have a more complete say in the next-generation vehicle architecture.

According to the statement in the announcement, the joint venture will serve the construction of high-level intelligent driving R&D capabilities, and promote the integration of intelligent technology and vehicle product demands.

In short, SAIC brings scenarios, funds, and supply chain discourse power to the table, while Momenta brings in algorithms, engineering capabilities, and iteration rhythm, and both sides push the cooperation relationship from a project-based system to an organizational level.

For SAIC, giving up the controlling stake in exchange for a complete technical channel from algorithms to chips and then to vehicle implementation, as well as the certainty of Momenta's large-scale replication within the SAIC system. For Momenta, after IPO, it needs in-depth binding with a vehicle group to support the "mass production implementation capability" chapter in its valuation narrative.

02

Years of "mutual commitment", SAIC gains more than just money

To understand why this joint venture happens at this time, we need to look back at the path the two sides have taken.

The contact between SAIC and Momenta began with technical verification in 2018, but the real turning point was in the second half of 2020.

At that time, the IM brand was about to be released, and SAIC needed a full-stack intelligent driving solution that could support its high-end positioning, while Momenta had not yet undergone complete pre-installation mass production verification. The two sides quickly finalized a cooperation framework covering full-stack software and equity investment in a short period of time, far faster than the industry's conventional 1 to 2-year POC cycle.

SAIC's capital layout on Momenta was even earlier. In January 2017, it participated in Momenta's Series A financing through Shangqi Capital. Later, SAIC Motor led the investment as a strategic investor in Series C in 2021, becoming its largest institutional strategic investor.

Momenta's financing situation

At the same time, Momenta holds shares in IM Motors in reverse, forming a two-way shareholding structure. This arrangement was interpreted as "capital binding technology" at that time, but the mass production implementation in the following years proved its practical value.

The IM L7 is the first mass-produced model of the cooperation between the two sides, and it is also Momenta's "first test" from demonstration to vehicle-grade delivery. After that, the IM AD intelligent driving system gradually covers all IM models, extends to Feifan, SAIC Audi, and then to SAIC Volkswagen's Xingyun intelligent assisted driving system, which is equipped with the Momenta R7 reinforcement learning world model, improving the intelligent driving capability of the joint venture brand.

In addition to L2 mass production, the two sides have also carried out cooperation in the Robotaxi field. In 2025, SAIC's Xiangdao Robotaxi further signed a strategic cooperation with Momenta to promote the implementation of pre-installed mass-produced Robotaxi fleets, reusing the hardware platform of IM LS6.

Then comes the listing.

In July 2026, Momenta was officially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, becoming the "first stock of Physical AI", with a public offering oversubscribed by 414 times. The prospectus shows that SAIC is Momenta's largest external shareholder. According to data from Inno-Vision Capital, after Momenta's listing, SAIC holds about 8.65% of the shares, with a corresponding equity value of 5.218 billion yuan and a MOIC of 3.56 times.

Momenta was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July this year

This capital layout has achieved a considerable increase in book value after Momenta's listing.

As a shareholder, SAIC is pleased to see Momenta's valuation rise; as a customer, SAIC needs Momenta's technology to continue iterating and prioritize serving its own product rhythm. The joint venture is exactly the institutional arrangement to balance these two identities: Momenta holds the controlling stake in terms of equity to ensure the efficiency of technical decision-making; the SAIC system is the most certain source of demand in terms of business to ensure that the R&D direction does not deviate from mass production implementation.

From L2 mass production to L4 operation of Xiangdao Robotaxi, and then to the planning of pre-installed mass-produced Robotaxi fleets, the multi-brand and multi-scenario system provided by SAIC has always been the fuel for Momenta's data flywheel to operate.

Years of cooperation have already run through the closed loop of "capital binding - mass production verification - data feedback", and the joint venture hopes to continue this closed loop.

03

Conclusion

Of course, risks do not cease to exist. How to balance Momenta's identity as a "supplier" serving multiple car companies at the same time and the "in-depth binding" under the joint venture framework is still a variable that needs to be observed.

But at least from the capital and organizational level, SAIC and Momenta have bound each other more closely than the relationship between most car companies and suppliers. At a time when the industry is generally shrinking investment, the signal significance of this in-depth binding may be more worthy of attention than the gain or loss of short-term controlling stake.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Cyber Car" (ID: Cyber-car), written by Zhang Lianyi, edited by Jiang Tianshuang, and published with authorization from 36Kr.